This invention relates particularly to management of web bookmarks, and generally to management of document assets.
The success of the world wide web has fostered the development of tools to assist users in the task of managing a surfeit of online resources. Web bookmarks, sometimes known as favorites, are one of the oldest tools for managing collections of web resources. Despite many innovations in managing bookmarks, existing systems are variously deficient, as will be described.
Even the oldest web browsers, such as Lynx and Mosaic, provided for management of a limited collection of web bookmarks. The oldest and simplest management mechanism was a flat collection, to which a user could accumulate links to selected online resources. The limitations of a flat collection become apparent as the number of bookmarks starts to exceed a few dozen.
An early innovation to bookmark management was the provision of folders for hierarchical organization of larger collections of bookmarks. In folder-oriented bookmark management, users or systems organize a bookmark collection by analogy to a file system. A folder of bookmarks may contain bookmarks or additional folders. Modern browsers and many third-party systems support folder-oriented bookmark management; such systems will be familiar to those skilled in the art. A notable resource for folder-oriented bookmark management is the XML Bookmark Exchange Language (XBEL), which permits browser-independent interchange of bookmark data. See “The XML Bookmark Exchange Language”, by Fred L. Drake, Jr. (1998), available online at http://pyxml.sourceforge.net/topics/xbel/.
If the folders are organized according to specialization and generalization relationships (more general folders contain more specific folders), the user may construct a taxonomy for bookmark management, which is potentially very useful. The folder hierarchy provides a limited taxonomy since it permits only a single generalization. Folder-oriented bookmark management thus lack convenient native support for multiple generalizations in a taxonomy. XBEL and other systems augment the folder scheme with aliasing to permit a bookmark to be assigned to multiple folders, thereby alleviating to some extent the disadvantage that a singleton-genus taxonomy imposes.
Folder-oriented bookmark management permits management of arbitrarily large bookmark collections, but it imposes substantial disadvantages for the user when bookmarks are captured and retrieved. At capture time, the user must select a folder destination for a new bookmark, thus performing a classification task. At retrieval time, the user must determine the folder in which a desired bookmark resides, potentially requiring a multistep traversal of the bookmark folder hierarchy. These are non-trivial operations, especially when the bookmark collection is large and the folder hierarchy is several levels deep.
To alleviate the disadvantages of folder-oriented bookmark management, many systems have been described to automate classification and/or retrieval in folder-oriented bookmark management. Automatic classification of documents to computed categories has been actively explored in the prior art. The assignment of bookmarks to categories based on the textual content of target resources is a special case of document classification. A beneficial aspect of automatic classification is the provision of a taxonomy, in which topics are related by specialization and generalization. A disadvantage of automatic classification is that the user must substantially cede personalized characterization of a bookmark resource. Since the purposes of the user in collecting bookmarks can hardly be known to the creators of target resources, the loss of personalization cannot be easily remedied by analysis of the target resource contents.
A major advance in managing bookmarks was achieved with the introduction of tagging for bookmark collections. Tags are labels which are associated with sets of bookmarks. Tags function much like keywords; however, in practice, keywords are often associated with controlled vocabularies prepared by experts, while tagging is typically associated with communities of ordinary users. Tagging is closely related to the practice of social bookmarking, in which a community of users share bookmarks. Exemplary systems include Delicious (http://del.icio.us/) and Connotea (http://www.connotea.org/). A valuable survey of social bookmarking may be found in these papers: “Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review,” by Tony Hammond et. al, D-Lib Magazine 11(4), April 2005, available online at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html; and “Social Bookmarking Tools (II): A Case Study—Connotea,” by Ben Lund et. al, D-Lib Magazine 11(4), April 2005, available online at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/lund/04lund.html.
Tagging alleviates the inconvenience of directly managing folders without the penalty of ceding classification to an automatic process, but the loss of a taxonomy due to the flatness of tags is disadvantageous. Moreover, tag assignment does not exploit the flexibility of natural language descriptions; obtaining a precise description of the relevance of a bookmark resource without the expressive subtlety of natural language may be difficult or impossible. Furthermore, the capability for description is available to every literate user of natural language, while effective tagging is a skill that must be acquired.
In view of the disadvantages attaching to bookmark managers in the prior art, alternatives to existing bookmark managers are desirable. An object of the present invention is to gain many of the benefits of automatic classification, including automatic computation of a taxonomy, without sacrificing the capability for user-specific personalization. Another object of the present invention is to accommodate the full expressive power of natural language in description and classification of bookmark resources. Another object is to provide a representation of a bookmark collection which is convenient for automatic processing. Another object is to provide a richly structured presentation of a bookmark collection which is convenient for browsing and informal search.